MOBILE, Alabama --The Mobile County Commission has nearly finished its effort to buy up land, sometimes forcibly, around its airport on Dauphin Island in order to create a safety buffer.

In all, the county says it needs to buy eight properties in order to enforce the runway protection zone, commonly called an RPZ. Five of the properties had houses on them. All will be bulldozed by the time the process is finished. Some already have been.

The acquisitions are on track to cost more than $2 million, depending on how future court battles shake out. Almost all of the cost will be covered by federal grant money, according to the county.

Of the eight properties that fall within the RPZ:

Two were purchased through negotiations.

Two are still being negotiated.

Four were claimed under the auspices of eminent domain, which allows the county to forcibly purchase the property through condemnation.

Two of the owners whose property was condemned continue to fight the county, hoping to get a better price.

Conflicting understanding of requirements

Officials cautiously supportive of condemnations

Mobile County Commissioner Mike Dean initially opposed the use of eminent domain to purchase property for a runway protection zone near the end of the Dauphin Island airport.

“In order to maintain certification of the airport, the county had to follow the FAA guidelines for the Runway Protection Zone. From the beginning, my concerns were always the best interests of the property owners that were being drastically affected by this action weighed against the need to protect the county’s assets that benefit the county at large,” Dean said in a statement. “However, once I was given a complete explanation of the process used to determine the property values, and the requirements to keep the airport certification, I was able to support the recommendation of the County Engineering Department to acquire the properties.”

Commissioner Merceria Ludgood also supported the condemnations.

“It is my opinion that eminent domain should be used only in the case of a compelling state interest. My understanding is that the FAA advised Mobile County that a dangerous condition existed at the Dauphin Island Airport. The only way to remedy that condition was to acquire additional land near the airport.

“The law protects property owners affected by these difficult choices. The county must pay the fair market value of the property taken by eminent domain,” she said.

Mobile County’s third commissioner, Connie Hudson, was not yet elected to her position when the decision was made to acquire the land.

When the condemnation process first got under way, the Dauphin Island town council held a community meeting and issued a letter asking the County Commission to do whatever possible to avoid using eminent domain.

“Obviously we don’t like to see anyone lose their property,” said Mayor Jeff Collier in an interview. “That’s something no one can take pride in. But based on the information we have, it doesn’t seem like there are other options.

“I understand the concern for air safety,” Collier said, “but at the same time, it has an impact on the ground as well.”

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Compiled by Robert McClendon and Jillian Kramer

County officials say that the use of eminent domain was unfortunate but necessary in order to comply with Federal Aviation Administration guidelines. Failure to do so, they said, could put future grant money at risk, and would likely force the county to pay back previously obtained grant money — $2,920,079 since 2006.

With that much money at stake, the county officials said, they had no choice but to buy up the private property.

When pressed, officials from the FAA said that wasn’t technically true. “FAA encourages, but cannot compel, airport owners to obtain control of RPZs,” said Kathleen Bergen, a spokeswoman for the FAA.

Rans Black, an FAA manager who oversees airport planning and oversight in Alabama and Mississippi, said the county’s misunderstanding was understandable. Grant agreements require recipients to maintain certain standards. Those standards say that residences are prohibited in the RPZ, he said.

Following that logic, it’s reasonable that the county would assume it had no choice but to purchase the land, Black said.

Had the county declined to enforce the RPZ, it would not have had to pay back previously received grant money, nor would it have lost access to future grant money, he said. Nevertheless, Black stressed that the FAA has “strongly encouraged,” the county to purchase the property, and is “100 percent behind what they are doing.”

County could have faced state sanctions

Even though the FAA couldn’t force Mobile County’s hand, the county could have faced sanctions on a state level, said John Eagerton, head of the Alabama Department of Transportation’s Aeronautics Division.

“I don’t know if we could license them if they’d refused to comply,” he said.

All of the aviation and engineering officials interviewed by the Press-Register stressed that the purpose of the protection zone is to preserve the safety of those who use the airport and the people who lived near it.

That reasoning sounded suspicious to Gerald Graham, who owned one of the properties purchased by the county and is currently suing in the hopes of getting a higher price.

There have been houses in the buffer zone for decades, he said, and no planes have ever crashed into them. So why all of a sudden is there a question of safety?

Eagerton said that the safety issue was always there, there just wasn’t any money to rectify the problem.

“Technically, they’ve been out of compliance for all those years,” he said.

A decade ago, about two thirds of all the certified airports in Alabama were also out of compliance, Eagerton said, but then the FAA started making more money available for airport development. Starting with the busiest airports, the Aeronautics Division worked with the FAA to buy up RPZ property all across the state.